The press release write-up on the History Channel’s website
reads as follows:

The
world is coming to an end on December 21, 2012! The ancient Maya made this
stunning prediction more than 2,000 years ago. We'll peel back the layers
of mystery and examine in detail how the Maya calculated the exact date of
doomsday. Journey back to the ancient city of ChichenItza, the hub of Maya civilization
deep in the heart of Mexico's YucatanPeninsula, to uncover the truth about
this prophecy. The Maya were
legendary astronomers and timekeepers--their calendar is more accurate than
our own. By tracking the stars and planets they assigned great meaning to
astronomical phenomena and made extraordinary predictions based on them--many
of which have come true. Could their doomsday prophecy be one of them?
In insightful interviews archaeologists, astrologers, and historians speculate
on the meaning of the 2012 prophecy. Their answers are as intriguing as the
questions.

Sounds
like a fairly non-biased survey of ideas, theories, and scholarship. Well,
it’s not. It’s 45 minutes of unabashed doomsday hype
and the worst kind of inane sensationalism. The History Channel educates us
only in how NOT to make a documentary about 2012. I speak from the vantage
of someone who was consulted on the script content. In addition, as a researcher
into Maya cosmology and the Mesoamerican calendar systems, I was also interviewed
for the documentary and appear in several segments. In fact, my pioneering
work was supposed to be featured. However, the original concept for the presentation
morphed through a series of executive edits to result in the error-riddled
and flagrant attempt at fear-mongering and sensationalism that you can view
on August 3. I’m always interested in clarity in examining how these things
happen, so will share the background to the production of the documentary.

Last summer, I was contacted by the segment producer and
asked if I wanted to be interviewed for the program. I discussed with him
what they wanted to do. He said that their initial contact, who contributed
formative ideas for the script, was a novelist named Steve Alten.
He was the author of a book called Domain.
This book liberally drew ideas and original research from my 1998 book Maya Cosmogenesis
2012, and combined it with science fiction and the space alien thesis
of Von Daniken to offer a heady stew of fast-paced
sci-fi adventure. Alten has written other best selling
books, choosing scary subjects like ancient sea monsters. The end of the world
in 2012 must have proven irresistible to him, and Domain was followed by two sequels.

Alten wrote an initial two-page
treatment for the History Channel’s segment producer, and it oozed with doomsday.
My work, on the other hand, examines the early Maya site of Izapa, as the likely locus of the origin of the Long Count
calendar (the 2012 calendar). The monuments of Izapa
are thus viable sources of information on the original formulation of “the
2012 prophecy.” I also have investigated the symbolism of the Maya ballgame
and the Hero Twin Creation Myth to propose a new interpretation of the Maya
World Age doctrine being based in astronomy. In brief, all evidence points
to a repeating sequence of World Ages. To the extent that 2012 is the end
of a World Age, the idea of a definite apocalypse and cataclysm is simply
short-sighted. Instead, for the Maya, period endings great and small were
always met with expectations of renewal and rituals to facilitate transformation.

The producers seemed to take my perspective to heart. They
decided that a point-counterpoint presentation would be the way to do it,
a dialogue between the doomsday and renewal perspectives. With the inclusion
of archaeologistDr. Arlen
Chase, as a moderate grounding voice, the documentary proceeded as a non-biased
presentation of different perspectives on 2012, and the viewer would be left
to decide for themselves what they believed. In the run-up to the filming
trip to ChichenItza in September 2005, I was emailed
many times for various facts and figures, and directions to resources. Many
of the facts I offered were not included in the final cut, or were used in
service to the doomsday perspective. Dr. Cobos in
Mexico and
astrologer Bruce Scofield were also brought in to
interview.

As many readers may know, my unique thesis about 2012 is
that the ancient Maya intended that date to target a rare astronomical alignment
within the precession of the equinoxes. The December solstice sun shifts along
the constellations very slowly, and for thousands of years it has been proceeding
backwards through the sidereal constellations of Aquarius, Capricorn, and
into Sagittarius. The Milky Way crosses through the zodiac in early Sagittarius,
forming the Maya Sacred Tree or “crossroads” in the sky. Atsome point in time,
an era defined by the alignment of the December solstice sun and the Milky
Way will occur. It is an astronomical fact that this alignment of the solstice
sun and the Milky Way occurs in the years around 2012, and my theory begins
with this clue to examine how the astronomical features involved in this “galactic
alignment” are central to various Mesoamerican institutions, including the
ballgame and the Hero Twin Creation Myth.

Envisioning and understanding the galactic alignment has
often been a point of confusion, even though it can be illustrated easily
with 3-D graphics. I emphasized to the producers that it would be important
to illustrate this alignment clearly, and after the interviews in Mexico I
made my own little videotape for them, with me explaining with flip charts,
precisely how the calendar and the galactic alignment could be illustrated
with great effect. I was particularly pointed about this, because in the summer
of 2000 the Discovery Channel featured my work in their “Places of Mystery”
series, and they used a very substandard still graphic to illustrate the galactic
alignment. The producers agreed that a brief CGI segment to help viewers instantly
grasp what precession and the galactic alignment are would be critically important.
As it turned out, I was told that the History Channel decided to excise their
completed graphic from the final cut, in favor of a completely misleading
picture of the earth undulating within an amorphous blob of spaghetti-like
strings which gives no sense of precessional movement
or the solstice sun aligning with the Milky Way, as viewed from earth. Unfortunately,
this grave error proves to be only the tip of the iceberg.

In 45 minutes of airtime, the words “doomsday” and “annihilation”
are repeated dozens and dozens of times. The narrator associates my galactic
alignment thesis with doomsday several times. A brief 3-second clip in which
I mention hurricanes and tornadoes was taken out of context. Much of the relevant
explanations and material that I offered was disregarded and not included.
The sections on the mythology, ballgame, and the galactic alignment that they
tried to include were handled ineptly, with the exception of my summary of
the Hero Twin myth. My innovative work on the Pyramid of Kukulcan — a primary
focus in the documentary — was completely neglected. German scholar Ernst
Förstemann was mispronounced “Fosterman.”And the
list of factual errors goes on and on.

What should be most apparent to any viewer is that the unambiguous
message is: Doomsday 2012! What
happened to the non-biased 50/50 split between the doomsday and renewal perspectives?
That was what was presented to me as the framework a year ago. What happened?
Sleaze, hype and sensationalism happened. For this to happen
under the auspices of the History Channel is disappointing, to say the least.
Once again, even allegedly reputable documentary media outlets are hungry
to have their way with the 2012 topic, to the continuing detriment of clarity
and discernment. The History Channel’s documentary is a classic example of
how NOT to make a 2012 documentary. And the onus of responsibility is placed
squarely in their office, because the segment producers at MatchFrame
1080 had to abide by the editorial mandates of the HC execs, each time demanding
that it be dumbed down, dumbed down. And hyped
up, hyped up. This even got to the point where, just a short time ago, the
title was revised to “Mayan Doomsday Prophecy.” Where’s the non-bias in that?
Strangely, the press-release, pasted above, is carefully crafted to give a
sense that the documentary is indeed un-biased. So they want to have their
cake and blow it up, too. Viewers expecting something new and interesting
will be sorely disappointed. It’s the same old hype and disinformation that
under-informed and sensationalized media sources have been shoveling out for
decades.

One thing that the media execs at HC don’t seem to understand
is that clichés and stereotypes don’t sell, and the public doesn’t buy them.
Does Mr. Whipple sell toilet paper anymore? No. If making it sensational is
really about a bottom-line profit motive, then the HC should take a clue from
marketing & advertising gurus, who know that you can’t keep using the
same selling gimmick year after year. Doomsday is an old, old, marketing gimmick.
The consuming public is too wily for that, and will quickly flip the channel.
What needs to take place is a negating
of the clichés and stereotypes. And in many instances the antithesis happens
to be the truer position. One annoying cliché is “the Maya disappeared.” No
they didn’t — there are still millions of pure-blood
Maya living in the Guatemalan
highlands. Who dictates that the public will find this uninteresting? Or another
malapropism: "Quetzalcoatl was a tall, bearded white guy." Give
me a break. Another cliché reveals modern values misapplied to ancient Maya
calendar science: “The Maya calendar was extremely accurate.” Well, perhaps,
but that misses the whole point of the Mesoamerican calendar being designed
as a holistic system of nested cycles that harmoniously embrace the commensuration
of planetary and eclipse cycles. It’s not about precise accuracy, it’s about
comprehensive comprehension. The Mesoamerican calendar embraces not only different
astronomical cycles, but different dimensions of human experience, from human
biology to agriculture to astronomy. THAT is the wonder and miracle of Maya
time philosophy. Mere accuracy is an irrelevant offshoot of the grand cosmovision attained by the Maya. To drool over the observation
that the calendar is “accurate” is like saying that The Glorious and Radiant All-Compassionate
Mother of the Gods is “cute.” No, it’s worse than that—it’s like saying
she has a nice ass.

We must raise the bar in how Maya traditions are presented,
and in how cutting-edge research is treated. In regards to the Maya, the media
hasn’t progressed at all since Leonard Nimoy’s “In
Search Of…” circa 1972. As far as I can tell, it’s not all still a mystery.
Answers are being found; solutions and theories are being offered. And the
History Channel has done a great disservice to the evolving discussion. In
the end, they aggressively emphasized the doomsday perspective of Steve Alten,
a novelist who cherry-picked a few odd tidbits of superficial horror. The
HC prioritized the doomsday perspective of a novelist whose goal was to entertain
and make money, and neglected or misrepresented facts and careful research.
If this is the kind of hype that is going to inform the public as we get closer
to 2012, then we are in trouble. The problem
is not with the viewing public, it's with the clueless producers.

For an example of a forthcoming documentary on 2012 that
DOES raise the bar, produced independently without the benefit of $350,000
worth of wasted corporate funding, see http://www.2012theodyssey.com/

I will also be discussing the Hysteria Channel’s debacle
on the night of August 3, after it airs, on Mitch Battros’sEarth Changes TV internet radio program: http://www.earthchangestv.com/.